Some of you have asked me for my thoughts about the construction of a
major Islamic center-a recreational, cultural and religious complex
rising thirteen (or is it fifteen?) stories high, with a mosque as its
principal feature-on a site no more than 600 feet from where the World
Trade Towers once had stood as the preeminent symbol of America's
economic might, and where some three thousand civilians, most but not
all of them Americans, were consigned to a monstrous death, incinerated
in a fire-storm as hot as the sun or forced, in order to escape the
flames, to leap to their death hundreds of feet below, all in the name
of a twisted obsession: to wage jihad for the
glory of Allah! My own views on this matter leave no room for
ambiguity: construction
of this complex on this particular site is NOT in America's best
interests. Let Faisal Abdul Rauf, the project's instigator and
the mosque's imam-to-be, build on another site, one that is not
directly and forever linked with memories of 9/11.

David Paterson, the governor of New York State, has offered to help the
imam select such a site.

What is at issue is not the
constitutional right of a legally recognized religious group to erect a
building on a property to which the group holds title. No reasonable
American will dispute that right. What is at issue is
whether pressing forward with this project will do harm, psychological
harm to those whose loved ones had their lives cut short a mere stone's
throw from where this mosque would stand-for them execution of
this project would be the continuous twisting of a knife in a festering
wound--and
political harm to our nation as well, in view of the way that radical
networks in the Muslim world would certainly interpret our
collaboration in such a project. Radical Islamists- such as the
Muslim Brotherhood and closely related terrorist groups-would hail the
building of this complex precisely at Ground Zero as proof that
Americans are cowardly fools and decadent appeasers, willing to
humiliate themselves by kissing the feet of their enemies even as those
enemies raise in their midst a monument to a spectacular victory. I
cannot imagine a more effective ploy for recruitment to the cause of Al
Qaeda and friends than representation of the this mosque as a
predictive symbol and "divine" assurance of shariah's ultimate triumph.
Radical Islam will pass in the Muslim world for "the stronger horse" if
America's will to resist implacable foes is perceived to be
crumbling.

And then there is the question, the important question, of precisely
which version of
Islam will be promoted in Imam Rauf's Islamic center. Which
prompts in turn the question: Where will the
principal funding for this one hundred million dollar project be found?
In Saudi Arabia perhaps? With its intransigent commitment to the most
fanatical form of Islam, the Wahhabi creed to which most of the 9/11
terrorists adhered?

Helpful in discerning what may lie at the root of the proposal for this
Ground Zero Mosque is the principle laid down in the Muslim
Brotherhood's own official handbook for radical Islamists working in
America, a copy of which fell into the hands of the FBI in a recent
raid on a radical mosque, as described in Andrew McCarthy's
extraordinary study The Grand Jihad.
Mr. McCarthy was the leading attorney in our government's successful
prosecution of "the Blind Sheikh" and his collaborators who back in
1993 set off a truck bomb in the basement of one of the Twin Towers.
Mr. McCarthy took the title of his book-The Grand Jihad-from the phrase
used in the handbook itself to describe the Muslim Brotherhood's
on-going effort to bring America down.

Here is the Brotherhood's clear if clumsy description of its goal and
the strategy recommended for its achievement: "Eliminating and
destroying the Western civilization FROM WITHIN and
'SABOTAGING' its miserable house by THEIR hands and the
hands of the believers SO THAT IT IS ELIMINATED and God's
religion is made victorious over all other religions." The Muslim
Brotherhood would have us collaborate in our own destruction. Is this
Act One?

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The Muslim Brotherhood's scenario for close collaboration with
officials of the American government in order to advance the
Brotherhood's interests seems to be playing very well. Among those
present at President Obama's recent Ramadan dinner at the White House
were the following interesting personalities, as described by Frank
Gaffney on August 13th over the Cultural
Art wire service.

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Cultural Art
wire-service By: Frank
Gaffney August 13,
2010

...Consider a few examples from this year's Iftar dinner [the White
House Ramadan) guest list:

Ingrid
Mattson heads the largest Muslim Brotherhood front in the country, the
Islamic Society of North America. ISNA was AN UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATOR
in the biggest terrorism-financing trial in the nation's history and
was identified as
a Brotherhood "associated or friendly" group in documents
introduced as evidence uncontested in that Holy Land Foundation
prosecution. Ms.
Mattson now presides over the selection, training and certification of
MUSLIM CHAPLAINS for the U.S. military and prison
system--interestingly, a job formerly in the hands of Muslim Brother
Abdurahman Alamoudi, the founder and first head of the American Muslim
Council, who is currently serving a 23-year sentence on terrorism
charges.

Salam
Al-Marayati is president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).
In 1991, then-House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt withdrew his
nomination of Al-Marayati to a leadership position on the National
Commission on Terrorism when it became public that Al-Marayati claimed
that the TERRORIST group, Hezbollah [Iran's catspaw on Israel's
northern border]
is a legitimate organization and has the right to attack the Israeli
Army.

Dalia Moghed
runs the insidious Gallup Center for. Muslim Studies and advises
President Obama on Muslim affairs
as a member of the President's Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood
Partnerships.

In an
October, 2009 interview with the London Telegrapah, she made the
following astounding assertions: "I think the reason so many women support
shariah is because they have a very different understanding of
shariah than the common
perception in Western media." "The MAJORITY of women
around the world associate gender justice, or JUSTICE FOR WOMEN, WITH
SHARIAH COMPLIANCE." [Shariah compliance involves such
woman-friendly measures as stoning to death, divorce at the caprice of
the husband, wearing the burqa, foregoing education, polygamy and
wife-beating]....

The most prominent American public figure to directly challenge such
pap is former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, in remarks before the
American Enterprise Institute last month, declared: "STEALTH jihadis
use political,
cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools, VIOLENT jihadis
use violence.
- But in fact they're
BOTH engaged in jihad and they're BOTH seeking to
impose the same end state which is to replace Western
civilization with a radical imposition of shariah"....

*
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As for the Ground Zero Mosque's
imam-to-be, Faisal Abdul Rauf himself, you may find the following
report by historian Victor Davis Hanson to be illuminating. -

... To his liberal defenders, Imam.Faisal Abdul Rauf is a sort of
respectable Deepak Chopra who at respectable places like Aspen mouths pop platitudes
of interfaith tolerance-so much so that our own State Department
has employed him, apparently for quite some time, for goodwill
gailivanting abroad.

But to those in the Middle East, he is known equally well for doing
what he can, as a Western liberal, to contextualize terrorism, bin
Laden, and Islamic extremism within the tired Western postmodrn tropes
of cultural relativism: "The United States'
policies were an ACCESSORY TO THE CRIME that happened' on 9/11; "In
fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is MADE IN THE
U.S.A.".; 'The U.S. and the West must acknowledge the HARM they
have done to Muslims before terrorism can end" [like, for example, the
hundreds of millions of dollars that Americans donated to Muslim
Indonesia after the recent day-after-Christmas tsunami, even as
oil-rich Saudi Arabia gave a mere pittance; or like the U. S. military
intervention in Bosnia to stop the Serbs from killing Muslims]....

The entire
notion of a "Ground Zero mosque" was the brainchild of Imam Rauf
himself. He grasped at once the brilliant cynicism involved: Here at home well-
meaning liberals would APPLAUD the audacity of hope in positioning a
mosque near the 9/11 site in order to "commemorate" the "tragedy," as a
token of TOLERANCE where ALL COULD COME TOGETHER and thus avoid another
MISUNDERSTANDING of the sort that sent two airliners crashing into two
skyscrapers.

ABROAD, THE
MESSAGE WOULD, OF COURSE, BE INTERPRETED QUITE DIFFERENTLY: To
the radical Islamists, a mosque rising
near Ground Zero (well before a new World Trade Center is constructed)
is a message of ISLAMIC TRIUMPHALISM-IN
THE LONG TRADITION OF MINARETS ON THE CONQUERED SANTA SOPHIA
[Justinian's immense Christian Church] in Istanbul; the eighth-century
Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, rising on the site of the DESTROYED Jewish.Second
Temple; and the
great mosque at Cordoba retrofitted from the GUTTED Christian Church of
St. Vincent. Again, there are thousands of sites in New York
where another mosque could be built; but without the Ground Zero
RESONANCE the IRONY would be lost....

Then there is the IMAGE
OF AMERICA. Note that the world is NOT TALKING
about.banning the burqa in FRANCE, or
shutting down a mosque in GERMANY. Much
less are we familiar with the RUSSIANS
leveling Muslim Grozny or the CHINESE rounding up and
jailing or shooting Muslims. And, of course, few care that the SAUDIS... would JAIL a Christian [who
dared to display a cross in public]... or WOULD KILL A
NON-BELIEVER who tried to enter Mecca.

No, Imam
Rauf wanted to SHOW THE WORLD that the most religiously tolerant
country in-thie world [the U.S.A.] was, in fact, hypocritically
INtolerant. It is hard to do that in an anything-goes America,
where [expletivedeleted] Christ art
and shoot-Bush Knopf novels are considered hip creative
expressions. But
build a mosque a stone's throw away from Ground Zero? Now that was a
brilliant move, one that would draw a reaction from everyone from Glenn
Beck to the New York labor unions. All Imam Rauf had to do was PROPOSE
the Mosque site, scram out of the country for a month and LET THE
LIBERAL ELITE AND THE MEDIA LECTURE THE WORLD on how nativist,
xenophobic, and INTOLERANT the most tolerant nation in the world,
[America] REALLY was-sort of lighting a firecracker, tossing it
into a crowd from a moving car, speeding away, and watching the ensuing
human fireworks in the rear-view mirror ....

...
Imam Rauf is a rascal, but he is at least a brilliantly cynical one.